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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tekboy who wrote (102519)	6/23/2003 11:34:33 PM
From: KonKilo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Bully for Blix, providing an opposition, one that the invertebrate Dems so far have failed to offer...Lindy, you're gonna love the last line. UN Arms Inspector Blix Criticizes U.S. Over Iraq By Grant McCool NEW YORK (Reuters) - The longer the United States and Britain occupy Iraq (news - web sites) without finding weapons of mass destruction, the more conceivable it is that Baghdad destroyed them after the first Gulf War (news - web sites) in 1991, chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said on Monday. Blix, to retire next week after heading inspections before the U.S.-led war on Iraq began in March, also spoke critically at a think tank meeting of one of Washington's key arguments for overthrowing Iraq President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites). "It is sort of fascinating that you can have 100 percent certainty about weapons of mass destruction and zero certainty of about where they are," Blix said at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Two months after the fall of Baghdad in a war launched after the United States and Britain accusing Saddam of illegally harboring nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, their troops still have not found any such weapons. "I'm simply saying that the longer we are in this situation without finding anything, the more we have to ask ourselves is it conceivable that they did destroy in '91," Blix told Reuters Television after the event. Saddam said the weapons were destroyed in 1991 when a U.S.-led international coalition ousted his army from Kuwait. Blix has said that inspectors made their last significant finds in 1994. Blix's U.N. inspectors searched for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq from November 2002 to March 2003. Some U.S. officials faulted the Swede for failing to produce tougher reports on Iraq's purported weapons. But on Monday, Blix took aim at the Bush administration's assertions that Washington needed more time to find Iraq's weapons. "Three-and-a-half months for new inspections was a rather short time before calling it a day and especially when we now see the U.S. government is saying that, 'look, you have to have a little patience, you know these things take time.' All right," Blix told his audience of foreign policy analysts, business leaders, academics and journalists. Blix, retiring on June 30 after heading the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission since March 2000, said he would like to write a "nuanced view" of the period.

To: tekboy who wrote (102519)	6/23/2003 11:58:44 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Fact: No one really knows what Sharon wants or is willing to do, but there is as much evidence that he seeks indefinite continued Israeli occupation of the territories as that he favors Israeli withdrawal from them. I don't think you've been watching Sharon's behavior as PM that carefully. He has staked out the center of Israeli politics, which means that he favors continued occupation as long as the choice is creation of a terrorist state. He does not favor perpetual occupation - why else do you think he told his cabinet that occupation (kibush) could not continue indefinitely? He knows that with Oslo Israel gave up claims to most of the West Bank. But there's a big differences between a real peace treaty and a unilateral withdrawal under fire.